My Brief Stint as an Examiner

For those of you who show up expecting a Big Bird fix, I apologize for the interruption, but this isn't strictly a Big Bird blog (yet), so settle down. When I get another picture in my email or when I figure out how my parents' scanner works so I can scan the latest (hand-drawn) picture, regular muppet service will resume. In the meantime, either read this regrettably long, semi-serious rant or get to work drawing me pictures. Can you do any less?

Begin rant.

Recently I started writing for examiner.com, an employer that is constantly bombarding job sites like monster.com. They're always looking for both national and local writers covering topics as broad as "Young Adult Pop Culture" and as specific as "The Beatles" -- though my dad might argue that "The Beatles" is just as broad a topic, so let's say there are topics as specific as..."Handbags." (Seriously. Who are these people?)

I didn't know if I was enough of an expert in any subject to qualify, but I finally bit when I saw a call for a local "Food and Drink" examiner. I figured, Hey, I eat food and drink drinks. I also figured, Hey, I'm already cooking and blogging about cooking pretty regularly. I went on to figure, Hey, the Portland area's not a bad one for covering local food and drink. Finally, I figured, Hey, if I could continue doing what I was doing but get some slight professional cred along with some slight monetary compensation, so much the better.

I'm good with figures.

I was kind of excited, and for my first official article I fleshed out my application's sample piece about LeRoux Kitchen's Baker's Thursday event. I saved it for the editorial team to review it, which is allegedly what they do with each article before it goes live. My article passed muster, it went live, and I was officially a published Examiner. I posted a link to my piece on LeRoux's Facebook page so they could see the positive review. Slight professional cred attained! Cool.

Examiner.com wants you to write at least two or three pieces a week, so a few days later I put together a little recipe for a Chocolate Peanut Butter Bourbon Milkshake. Stasia and I had recently made it, it was good and simple, and I even had a couple pictures I could run with the article. I saved it for the editorial team to review it. I waited.

And I never heard back.

If that were the only problem, I would have made an effort. It would probably be simple enough to contact someone at examiner.com, figure out what went wrong, sort it out, maybe alter or scrap the article if for some reason it didn't follow their rules or they didn't like it. But I had already been feeling uneasy about examiner.com. Here are the other major problems I have with that make me prefer to let the matter drop rather than pursue a working relationship with the site:

Examiner.com purports to pay based on factors such as page views, session length, and so on. That's not uncommon these days; in fact, it's very similar to Google Adsense's model, as far as I know. Here's the rub: nowhere will they tell you the formula for payment. Not even when you're "hired" and get your whole introductory spiel, which is mostly a few editorial rules and tips on how to navigate the site. So I'm just supposed to trust that I'll get my fair share of whatever advertising dollars they collect?

The only concrete figure given is $50: the amount of money you'll receive for each additional person you refer to examiner.com who gets accepted as a writer for the site. I know there are employers, such as summer camps, that thrive on word of mouth. But this feels less like a summer camp and more like a pyramid scheme. Keep drawing writers to the site, pound the Search Engine Optimization pavement, keep hitting the top of search engine lists, fill the site with obtrusive and aggravating advertising, toss a few cents around here and there, and profit at others' expense (okay, profit has to come at others' expense, but usually "others" are the consumers, not the workers).

These are the glaring issues, and there seems to be a lot more seething just beneath the surface, enough that my gut tells me to get out sooner rather than later. Google "examiner.com scam?" for yourself if you'd really like to know more, including the frighteningly conservative politics of the billionaire owner of Examiner.com, Philip Anschutz. When I didn't hear anything about my second article, it was the final push needed to convince me to sever my ties to examiner.com and stick to personal blogging for now. (Technically I didn't "sever" ties yet, so this is kind of like when I hated my coaches in college and "quit" track by never showing up again my senior year, or when I hated the Pope and "quit" the Catholic Church by never showing up again after being confirmed, Christmas mass notwithstanding. Actually quitting is harder than it sounds.)

My sister's working on her homepage and very generously offered me a sub-site, so maybe I'll take her up on that. I might not know her secret formula for paying me either, but I prefer her frighteningly liberal politics any day.